by Oliver MacNamee

By the time you read this the E.T. Extra Terrestrial 35th Anniversary Limited Edition print designed by Jonathan Burton for Mondo will have no doubt sold out (it has). These days if you want any chance of grabbing these sought after screenprints you have to be pretty damn fast and pretty damn effective. I was lucky to grab a recent Bullit print from their online store, but in the 3 or 4 minutes it took me to navigate through their checkout (and I was using PayPal too, to make it as quick as possible) the even more limited edition version had gone!

Here’s what Burton had to say about the poster:

Settling on an idea from this visually spectacular film was a difficult task. I sketched out many possibilities from different scenes but this one mainly stood out because of the wonderful ‘phone home’ contraption which I wanted to delve into. It’s a kind of W.Heath Robinson style construction where a small action of the wind in the trees tugs at a rope which pulls a fork to turn a wheel which sets off this surprising machine to send a message through space. It’s a magical moment in the film made all the more endearing by the use of Elliot’s 1980s equipment.

I didn’t want to shy away from showing E.T. as a major element of the poster as he’s so iconic but also because I welcomed the challenge of drawing a creature so fascinatingly odd. The character is a great design of unthreatening strangeness and this balance is tricky to capture. His pointing finger is an obvious tribute to the original poster though I like how we have it leading to his home, and with the special spot varnish we only get a glimpse of his solar system within the right light.

Oh how I crave the BMX of my youth.

So, I am probably cutting my own throat here (unless the guys and Mondo are reading this, that is, and maybe want to put one to the side for me?) by announcing that they will have a variant on the above design available at their store at Thought Bubble next weekend, September 23rd and 24th, but there you go. This is a comics and pop cultural newsite and, as you may have guessed from previous posts, I’m a bit of a Mondo fan.

I do hope I can grab one, rather than it going to some Ebay flipper and not a fan who will appreciate the work for what it is, but it’s doubtful given I’ll be at the 2000AD Juve Cube party the night before the con, and that can only spell trouble with a capital (G and) T.